17 Jul
2008
17 Jul
'08
10:18 p.m.
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:55:53AM -0400, Gregg C Levine wrote:
Hello!
Good to know.
However that's only valid for those individuals who are still running older
versions of Solaris.
It would not have impacted any version of Solaris, including the Open one.
And why you are asking? I am glad you asked. It seems that according to the
good people at the Sun offices here in the City, that by the time version 9
was released, that the code base was completely rewritten, and contains
absolutely nothing from BSD, and most certainly nothing from the original
creators of UNIX.
That is, of course, absurd, and whoever told you that doesn't have much of
a grasp of the source base. Yes, gobs of stuff has been rewritten --
but plenty of code dates from Back in the Day, especially in userland.
For evidence of this, I point (as I often do) to troff, and files like
http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/troff/n5.c,
which has had very little modification in the 18 years since The Merge,
and still contains comments like this gem:
/*
* The following routines are concerned with setting terminal options.
* The manner of doing this differs between research/Berkeley systems
* and UNIX System V systems (i.e. DOCUMENTER'S WORKBENCH)
* The distinction is controlled by the #define'd variable USG,
* which must be set by System V users.
*/
And those who know their history already know the punchline: much of
that code isn't going to change because (1) it basically works and (2) the
engineer who wrote it -- Joe Ossanna -- is dead, having died of a heart attack
in 1977. (This code is legend among Solaris developers; see, for example,
http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock/entry/real_life_obfuscated_code.)
- Bryan
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Bryan Cantrill, Sun Microsystems Fishworks. http://blogs.sun.com/bmc